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Ask HN: Your best follow-up strategies?

10 points by mishmax ↗ HN
How do you follow-up with people you're waiting for? I'm doing sales for a medical product I built, and the time it takes for a doctor to get back to me just kills me. A lot of follow-up and waiting is required before I finally get the sale. I often wonder, is there a better way to do this?

So HN, what methods work best for you when following up with a slow-moving organization or person? When waiting for a person to do something, do you just fire an email and forget about it? Or do you find it worth following up from time to time with reminders? How do you do that without getting annoying?

Has anyone experimented with hiring a virtual assistant to do the follow-up work for you? Are there other tools or hacks out there to make the follow-up process easier and find out why a person's taking so long to get back to you?

Your tips are appreciated! (And don't make me follow-up on that! ;-)).

10 comments

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Aaronontheweb
"do you just fire an email and forget about it?"

If you really care about getting something done, then you're going to need to stay on it. The best way to do it without being annoying is:

1. To be extremely polite and articulate each time you follow-up as it will not only make people more receptive to in your inquiry, but will help them have a better understanding of what it is you actually need;

2. Try to secure a "when can I expect to hear from you?" ballpark figure from the parties involved; that way they can set the expectation for when you should hear back from them and you can politely hold them to it;

3. Give people a reasonable amount of leeway - if the person you're contacting is extremely busy, it might take them weeks to follow up on a simple email. I contacted a CEO of a company which represents a model customer for my own startup service in late March to get some feedback from him; I didn't actually end up speaking to him until yesterday. That's just how it goes with busy people some times - just stay organized, keep a list of all of the people you've contacted and when, and periodically remind them when enough time has passed.

mishmax
Thanks for sharing your tips and experiences. Yeah I guess there's no magical solution. One thing also I find gets people's response is using 'I know you're busy, but...'. Ofcourse I haven't done any A/B testing on that or anything.
Aaronontheweb
A/B testing for this sort of thing is probably overthinking it :p, but I get your meaning though
mikeleeorg
+1 for the great tips. Especially for #2.

I would also add that it's important to follow up personally, at least for major accounts. (And if you do hire virtual assistant, train them to be able to follow up as if you were doing so somehow...)

I also sometimes try to add some value to my follow up. If I see a bit of news about the person's company or industry, I'll contact them and mention it, then tack on my gentle follow-up afterwards.

carbocation
Doctors have tons of shit, often important, to do all of the time. It's hard to imagine them getting so excited about a product (unless it's a snowmobile or a yacht, which I say from personal experience) that they'll drop something important to respond to your sales pitch.

It would help if I knew what type of medical product you were selling. Is it a device? A tool for front-office stuff? Billing or back-office?

mishmax
I sell cosmetic surgery visualization software that doctors (plastic surgeons) can use to tell patients how they might look like after a cosmetic surgery. It's more in the 'nice to have' than 'must have' realm for doctors, so maybe this is the issue as well.
carbocation
OK, here's an idea (perhaps a really bad one, but whatever). Do what you normally do, but also add in the following: follow up with the office staff. Give them a free demo. Ask if any of them want to try the software. But don't let them do it live. Take their photo (or whatever you need) and ask them what they'd want done. Then do it at home (even though you could do it live, don't). Follow up in a few days by emailing the before and after images to that office member and CC the doc.

Again, not sure if this would be effective, but office staff, in my experience, would love to talk about this type of stuff.

mishmax
Thanks, this is a creative idea. So you have experience selling to medical practices from before?
carbocation
I'm a medical student. In college I worked in a private practice office for surgeons (though not plastics). On the wards, I rarely interact with people doing sales (I actively avoid them, no offense) -- though on surgery, it's impossible since they end up being in the OR.

The thing that has surprised me is how much influence the office workers have on the physicians. Since your product has the potential to be fun for the office workers, this could really be an in. If you can get a physician assistant on your side, you've pretty much won the game, IMHO.

If people are offended ("What, you think I need a nose job?") you could switch it up and let office workers modify other office members with consent ("Hah! I want to give John a calf implant!").

kevinskii
I've had a sales rep trying to sell me unit testing software for over a year now. We were much too busy to do a proper evaluation of his product until just recently, and I haven't always returned his phone calls or emails. But I never asked him to stop, because I knew that his product was worth taking a look at. We finally got a chance to do so, and now we'll probably buy it.

Be patient. If they don't give you strong hints to leave them alone, it's okay to keep up the polite inquiries.